Strava appears to have disabled a key tracking feature over privacy concerns

This will come as no surprise to those who’ve been following the news of the past couple of weeks, but it appears that Strava’s disabled at least one top feature as it works to get to the bottom of recent privacy concerns over its mapping features. The app’s Segments feature looks to be at least temporarily offline, as first noted by The Verge by way of Reddit.

We reached out to the company company to determine whether that specific feature was a casualty of the company’s recent privacy woes. Without confirming the shuttering of any specific features, a spokesperson for Strava confirmed that certain functionality was, indeed, under review.

“We are reviewing features that were originally designed for athlete motivation and inspiration to ensure they cannot be compromised by people with bad intent,” Strava told TechCrunch in a statement. The note echoes a recent statement from Strava CEO James Quarles issued shortly after news broke that the company’s heat map functionality could be use to determine the location of military facilities.

“Many team members at Strava and in our community, including me, have family members in the armed forces, Quarles wrote. “Please know that we are taking this matter seriously and understand our responsibility related to the data you share with us.”

Segments, which is used to locate fellow worker-outers in a user’s vicinity, appears to be among those features under investigation. The aforementioned Reddit users have noted that clicking into it simply drops them back on the app’s dashboard.